In an attempt to secure an unexpected inheritance—and hopefully find a few answers—two estranged sisters and their newly discovered brother embark on a comically surreal trip through the Deep South to retrace the life of the mother who abandoned them as infants.
On a Tuesday afternoon, Chicago-based sisters Jesse Chasen and Jennifer McMahon receive a phone call notifying them that their birth mother has died, leaving behind a significant inheritance. But in order to obtain it, they must follow a detailed road trip she designed for them to get to know her—and that includes finding a brother they never knew existed. For the next week, this ill-assorted trio treks across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to meet their mother’s old friends, from circus performers to a juke joint owner, each of whom delivers a shocking vignette into the life of a young mother traumatized by loss and abuse. But in chasing the truth about their real mother, they may all just find their second chance.
A story of family trauma and transformation, The Key to Circus-Mom Highway is a profound, often hilarious, reminder that the family you'd never have chosen may turn out to be exactly what you need.
In an attempt to secure an unexpected inheritance—and hopefully find a few answers—two estranged sisters and their newly discovered brother embark on a comically surreal trip through the Deep South to retrace the life of the mother who abandoned them as infants.
On a Tuesday afternoon, Chicago-based sisters Jesse Chasen and Jennifer McMahon receive a phone call notifying them that their birth mother has died, leaving behind a significant inheritance. But in order to obtain it, they must follow a detailed road trip she designed for them to get to know her—and that includes finding a brother they never knew existed. For the next week, this ill-assorted trio treks across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to meet their mother’s old friends, from circus performers to a juke joint owner, each of whom delivers a shocking vignette into the life of a young mother traumatized by loss and abuse. But in chasing the truth about their real mother, they may all just find their second chance.
A story of family trauma and transformation, The Key to Circus-Mom Highway is a profound, often hilarious, reminder that the family you'd never have chosen may turn out to be exactly what you need.
"That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone:
Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment."
- Dorothy Parker
Tuesday Afternoon
The aging strip club façade was bleak in the mid-day Chicago sun, with the unusually warm October heat intensifying the smell of urine out by the trash bins in the parking lot. The failing neon sign over the club should have read “LIVE NUDE GIRLS”, but the V was out and the R was flickering, though “NUDE” shined oh-so-brightly. “LI E NUDE GI LS”. Unrelenting, bad strip music pulsed inside. Yeah, it was “Toxic.” Britney Spears didn’t want to be there either, not even in musical spirit.
Thirty-nine-year-old aging bartender and freelance tattoo artist Jesse Chasen brushed her shaggy, shoulder-length black hair out of her piercing yellow-green eyes as she paced. She was smoking her fifth Marlboro unfiltered of the day as she spoke on her cell phone, leaving yet another soon-to-be-ignored message for her older sister Jennifer.
Jesse was dressed in a black miniskirt, a Black Keys tank top, strategically torn fishnets, and Doc Martens. Her arms were covered in elaborate tattoos. On her right arm was a large fire-breathing dragon. Its tail wrapped around her wrist and its long, serpentine body climbed her arm to mid-bicep. The fire it breathed extended up from there, enveloping an impressive, jagged scar that began at her right shoulder and extended along her collarbone. The left arm was covered with a colorful phoenix rising from the ashes, but so far, that was just wishful thinking on Jesse’s part.
Despite her rapid descent into middle age, whip-smart Jesse still took pride in being relatively cute, but in an aging tough-girl, you-wouldn’t-hire-her-to-babysit-your-kids kind of way. Like if Joan Jett and Reese Witherspoon had a love child...
“Hi, it’s Jesse. Again. Look, I get it, you don’t want to lend me any more money, but could you please just return my calls. I’m in a really bad living situation right now, and I need some help, Jen. I need to--” Beeeeep.
Jennifer’s voicemail cut her off, just like it had during her previous six messages. Frustrated, Jesse hung up, tossed her cigarette onto the ground, and stomped it out amidst the broken glass that was sparkling like diamonds on the cracked asphalt.
Her break over, she headed back into the club, her mind swirling, desperate to figure out an escape from… well, pretty much every aspect of her current life. Her stomach lurched uncomfortably, probably because all she had eaten so far today was a handful of fluorescent Maraschino cherries from behind the bar, and nicotine didn’t count as a food group.
It was dark inside the club, so it took her eyes a few seconds to adjust. The throbbing beat of soul-deadening strip music was assaulting. God, I hate this place, she thought to herself for the thousandth time. But it had been the only job she could land after her extremely brief stint in the make-up department at Nordstrom’s. She had quickly discovered that the clientele there didn’t really want a bluntly honest answer to the question, “How does this look on me?” Though it wasn’t until she came to work in a sleeveless shirt one day, and her tatts frightened the over-sixty crowd, that she was unceremoniously canned by her (over-sixty) boss, Noreen. Not even a free mascara as a parting gift. “Cheap bastards” was the farewell message that she had left in the employee feedback box. “No” was the farewell message they had left on her voicemail after she requested a job reference from them. So… hello “LI E NUDE GI LS”.
The sparse, middle-of-the-day Tuesday crowd was watching a stripper who had definitely seen better days absentmindedly going through the motions onstage in the background, thinking about those better days, no doubt. She might as well have been doing her laundry, except that probably would have been sexier. Jesse went back to work behind the bar that perpetually smelled like it had been wiped down with a sour rag. Because it had been.
“Where you been?” slurred one of the drunk Tuesday regulars. “Gimme a shot of Benchmark.”
“You got it, hon,” she replied with a smile.
“And show me your tits,” he added.
Without missing a beat as she reached for the bourbon, Jesse glanced over at Dwayne, the thirty-two-year-old, 300+ pound bar-back who was restocking the glassware.
“Hey, Dwayne, this gentleman wants you to show him your tits.”
Dwayne set down the crate he was holding. With a sexy pout at the customer, he lifted up his pit-stained Simpsons t-shirt, letting his man boobs and potbelly hang out in all their glory, and started gyrating his hips to the music.
“I’s talkin’ to you, girl,” the customer said.
“Aw, I’m just teasin’ ya, Barney,” she said, winking at him. “And I bumped you up to a double of Bookers, no extra charge.”
Jesse was an expert at handling drunks in a way that shut them down without losing her tip.
“Nice!” he responded. With a little difficulty coordinating his stubby, intoxicated fingers, he peeled off a twenty-dollar bill from the sweaty wad of cash in his pocket and set it on the bar. “Keep the change.”
“Well, aren’t you a sweetheart,” she cooed with a smile, as she picked up the cash and slowly slid it into her bra for effect.
The scuffed-up olive-green bar phone on the wall, left over from the seventies but not in an ironic way, began to ring. Jesse didn’t answer it because she spotted her friend Tiny Tim, a big, hulking biker with a long ponytail, a handlebar mustache, and menacing neck tatts enter through the side door. He whipped off his black leather biker jacket, threw it down on a barstool, and showed Jesse a cursive tattoo on his shoulder that said Mandy.
“Can you do something with this, Jess? I came home last night and that bitch was in bed breeding with our dog walker. Our dog walker, fercrissakes.”
“Hmm,” she said studying it. “I think I might be able to turn this into a snake, or maybe a flying--”
“No, a snake would be fucking PERFECT,” he said.
Just then a perpetually-gum-chewing, bleached blonde, twenty-three-year-old with Daddy Issues stuck her head out from a side hallway, snapped her wad of cotton candy flavored Bubblicious, and yelled, “Jess! Call for you on line two.”
“Take a message. I’m busy,” Jesse said.
“You should probably take this call. And Kyle said to tell you to answer the damn phone when it rings.”
“Shut up, Amber,” she said dismissively, waving her off like she would a mosquito as she walked over to the phone. “I’m off Thursday, Tiny, so maybe then.”
Jesse picked up the receiver. “Hello?... Yeah, this is Jesse, who is this?” She listened to the voice on the other end of the line, her anger building. "What the fuck kind of joke is this, asshole? My parents died five years ago in a car cra-- ... What?... You’re fulla shit! … Well, then tell me something that proves it was-- ”
Completely thrown by the information that came next on the other end of the line, Jesse’s face went slack and she sunk down into a squatting position behind the bar. Her back was pressed against the wall, the phone cord stretched to its olive-green limit.
“Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, I understand... But is it... Yes, I understand.” She thrust her hand out in Dwayne’s direction. “Pen. I need a pen!”
Dwayne grabbed the chewed-up ballpoint Bic pen from his back pocket and a drink-stained cocktail napkin off of the bar. Jesse took them from him, holding the phone receiver between her ear and her shoulder.
“Okay, go ahead, I’m ready,” she continued to the voice on the other end of the line. She set the napkin on her knee and began to write. “Uh huh... uh huh... uh huh... Okay, got it. Thank you.”
The only thing that moved was her hand back to the receiver, then it slowly dropped to the floor. Other than that, she stayed frozen in place, staring, unblinking, at the sticky bar floor in front of her. Dwayne and Tiny Tim watched her, concerned.
“You okay, Jess?” Dwayne asked softly.
No response.
She remained motionless, attempting to make sense of her entire life prior to a minute and a half ago -- until the phone’s off-hook warning kicked in, jarring her back to her current reality. Lost in a daze and moving in slow motion, she stood up, oblivious to the blaring phone receiver still laying on the ground.
“You alright?” asked Tiny. “You look like you seen a ghost.”
Completely distracted, Jesse said to Dwayne. “Can you cover for me for a minute?”
Without waiting for his answer, Jesse ducked under the bar and headed down the side hallway to the back office, while Dwayne bent down to retrieve the phone receiver and place it back in its cradle on the wall.
***
It was a joke of an office with peeling, fake wood paneling, and stained pumpkin-orange carpeting. There were dirty dishes and crusty, old microwave food containers piled on every surface near the filthy microwave. Pictures of naked women holding guns and/or power tools and sitting on muscle cars covered the walls.
Amber leaned provocatively over strip club owner Kyle, who sat in his desk chair holding the back of her bare leg as she laughed and flirted with him. Amber was on a quest to unseat Jesse as the official First Lady of “Li e Nude Gi ls”.
“Yea, that’d be dope as fuck, Amber,” said Kyle.
No one seemed to know how old Kyle was, including Jesse, because he embodied a disturbing combination of overly greased and thinning salt-and-pepper hair, 1970s sideburns, speech that was constantly peppered with the latest high school slang, and competing scents of BLADE “Wild Temptations” body wash, BLADE “Shockwave” extreme hold hair gel, and BLADE “Caveman” deodorant.
To be fair, the overkill on scented Man Products was due to the fact that he also had a flatulence problem that he was self-conscious about, due to a problem digesting the dairy products that he refused to give up. Plus, there was the added benefit of concealing the odor of the crusty remnants of decaying, microwaved Salisbury steak with mac and cheese.
Back to the original point, though -- however old Kyle was, he looked like shit for his age.
Jesse stood in the doorway watching Amber fawn over the man Jesse had been living with for the past six months. She could feel the frustration with her life in general, and the disturbing call she had just received, coalesce into an angry pulsating mass that looked a lot like Jesse ripping all of Amber’s over-processed blond hair out of her head by its dark roots. Not that she really gave a rat’s ass about Amber and Kyle. But that violent image brought a fleeting measure of great joy to her weary, aging-tough-girl heart.
“I need a few days off,” Jesse said to Kyle while staring Amber down, not for the first time.
Caught off-guard, Amber’s head jerked around toward the door. She glanced back at Kyle and then quickly headed out of the office, not making eye contact with Jesse who intentionally banged into Amber’s shoulder as they passed one another.
“I need a few days off,” Jesse repeated.
“No, I’m short-staffed this week,” he said as he turned his attention to some paperwork on his desk -- the “paperwork” being the new issue of Dirty Polly Want a Cracker: The Magazine for the Discerning Southern Gentleman.
“Goddamn it, Kyle, I need a few days. How often have I asked for that? I’ve got an unexpected family... situation that I have to deal with.”
He eyed her for a moment then smiled a crooked, coffee-stained smile. (His BLADE “Albino” toothpaste was not working as advertised.) He held out his hand and said, “C’mere.”
She reluctantly took a few steps closer to him. He reached out and grabbed her hand and pulled her the rest of the way toward him. He began to unbuckle his painfully cliché Ed Hardy belt with the other hand. Jesse tried to pull away, but Kyle attempted to muscle her lower.
“You do me a favor, I do you a favor. That’s the way it works, baby. You know that.”
“Stop it. I’m not in the mood, Kyle,” snapped Jesse.
“You’re my fucking girlfriend. Get in the mood.”
He started to get a little rougher, trying to push her head down toward his groin. This was the final straw for Jesse with this asshole-boss-boyfriend. She punched him in the crotch making him convulsively release her from his grip. He howled as he grabbed himself in pain.
The force of the punch also caused his perpetually tightened sphincter muscles to relax, and he let loose a rip-roaring Ben & Jerry’s “Chunky Monkey” ice cream fart that he had been holding in since earlier that morning. Breakfast of Champions.
“Oh, my God,” said Amber’s disembodied voice from the hallway where she had been lurking.
“I’m done with this, you piece of shit. I quit,” Jesse said as she turned and headed for the door.
“Yeah?? Well, you’re too old to work here anyway. And you’re a lousy lay,” he said. “You’d better fucking be out of my place tonight when I get home! It’ll be a relief not to have to listen to your goddamn shitty guitar playing anymore.”
Without looking back, Jesse flipped him the bird over both shoulders as she walked out, passing Amber just outside the door. Without a glance in her direction, Jesse said, “He’s all yours, Amber. Good luck with that...”
Amber’s response to that was a loud snap of her gum as she braced her olfactory senses and headed back in to Kyle. Jesse, holding her stomach, made a beeline for the restroom down the hall where she immediately vomited. Not because of Kyle’s internal combustion system, but because the stress of life these past few weeks had been taking a toll on her own internal system.
“Shit,” she mumbled as she wiped her mouth with the last three squares of cheap, 1-ply toilet paper on the roll.
She rinsed her mouth in the stained porcelain sink, and wiped her face down with a handful of cool, wet paper towels, absentmindedly running her fingers along the scar on her collarbone as she so often did. She stared at herself in the cracked bathroom mirror, her reflection adorned with a crude drawing of a penis and hairy balls that some neighborhood Michelangelo had scratched into the glass at forehead level. She looked like a mutant unicorn from Three Mile Island.
“Now what?...” she asked her defeated reflection. No response came.
It had been a rough five years since her parents had died. Their sudden deaths had sent her into an escalating tailspin, which is what precipitated the difficulty she began to have holding on to jobs. Her living situation changed almost as frequently, which is the only reason she had ended up living with a creep like Kyle. Par for the course these days. She was repulsed by him, but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to make ends meet, she figured. Now here she was again, starting back at ground zero. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200. Not quite the life she had imagined for herself by age almost-forty.
She stared at the scar running along her collarbone. Most people’s emotional scars were easily hidden, but she had to look at her emotional scar every time she saw it reflected in a mirror, or a window… or in the eyes of every single goddamn person I meet, she thought. She had tried to camouflage it with the fire-breathing dragon tattoo, but all that did was put an enormous spotlight it. She couldn’t win for losing.
Dwayne was busy with a customer and didn’t see Jesse when she ducked back behind the bar to hastily grab her personal belongings. On second thought, as she was about to leave, she turned back, grabbed two bottles of the most expensive top-shelf liquor they carried, and set them on the bar in front of some customers.
“Help yourself, fellas. Kyle said it’s on him. He’s starting ‘Free Booze Tuesdays – All You Can Drink’. Tell everyone you know!”
The men practically pounced on the bottles of free tequila and whiskey. Jesse, with a deep breath, headed out the side door into the bright light of day, like a POW exiting captivity.
***
Jesse climbed three flights of stairs, then unlocked the front door and entered Kyle’s third-floor walk-up. His studio apartment was about as nice a place as his dingy office, except for a few touches here and there that made it seem like a woman had at least attempted to make it better than a frat boy’s dorm room, Chicago Bears bedspread notwithstanding.
Jesse darted around the apartment quickly, gathering her things and shoving her clothes and personal items into an old canvas duffel bag that she pulled down from a shelf in the closet. Once the duffel bag was full, she supplemented with a few plastic grocery bags that she pulled out of a broken kitchen drawer. Her thoughts as she raced around -- ranging from anger at Kyle, to relief at being rid of him, to panic about where she could land next -- bounced around in her head like a pinball machine. While snippets of her phone conversation replayed in her head on endless repeat mode.
Kyle’s puppy, in a dog cage in the corner, watched her curiously, head cocked to the side, wagging his tail as Jesse hurried about, mumbling to herself. He was a mixed breed puppy that Kyle said he found sleeping in the bushes outside their building. Though Jesse was pretty sure that was code for “I stole him from a neighbor who was distracted doing laundry in the basement.”
Kyle had grandiose plans to train it and make money in the underground dogfighting scene in their neighborhood. But since Jesse thought the sweet little thing might actually be part Golden Retriever and part Beanie Baby, she figured the odds weren’t good for the success of that business plan in the face of disgruntled Pit Bulls and Rottweilers.
Right on cue after Jesse mumbled to herself, “What am I forgetting?... What am I forgetting?” the puppy gave a tiny little yelp.
“Ohhhh, sweetie,” she purred at him.
She stood in the middle of the room facing the cage, conflicted, the two of them locked in a staring battle. The puppy won.
“Okay, I don’t know where we’re going to live, but I’m not leaving you here with that fucker. He doesn’t deserve you. Come here, baby,” she said as she set her bags down, pulled him out of the cage, and kissed him squarely on his soft, furry, blonde head. Then she set him down on the floor and picked up the dog cage. She carried it across the room where she proceeded to turn it sideways and dump the dog shit out of the cage and onto the center of the bed.
“Who’s the shitty lay now, Kyle?” she said to no one in particular.
Jesse walked back to the corner, set the cage down, picked up her bags and the puppy, and grabbed her guitar case that was leaning against the wall next to the front door. Then she walked out of Kyle’s place for the very last time, stealing his dog as she went.
Tuesday Evening
Jesse’s forty-one-year-old sister, Jennifer McMahon, lived in the perfectly manicured, upper-middle-class neighborhood of Glenview, Illinois with her perfect doctor husband Sean. Their perfect children, Connor and Maggie, were both attending their dad’s alma mater, Northwestern University. Though they lived on campus, they were close enough to bring their laundry home every week.
Glenview was a Chicago suburb where the inner-city problems a mere few miles away were like a story you read in the newspaper about some other country, and about which you could safely exclaim, “Oh, my goodness, that’s just awful!” while you finished your kale/banana smoothie and delightfully flaky almond croissant.
Geography was merely one item in the growing list of fundamental differences between the sisters. The scant two years that separated them in age was the closest thing about them these days. After years of Jennifer coming to Jesse’s rescue under the banner of “Oh, she’s just free-spirited,” Jesse’s increasing trouble over the last few years in terms of holding down a job, maintaining a stable living situation, and the need to be constantly bailed out financially had put intensifying strain on the already challenging relationship.
Jesse pulled up to the curb in her 1999 Alpine Green Dodge Neon, the left side of her front bumper tied on with nylon rope, with her stolen dog and all her earthly possessions in tow. She turned off the engine and tried to quell her rising sense of inadequacy as she stared at Jennifer’s fairytale, Brady-Bunch-on-steroids house.
She took a deep breath, looked at the puppy that was sitting on the passenger seat next to her cell phone, and said, “I’ll be right back. Don’t make any long-distance calls.”
She walked up to the front door, took another fortifying breath, and rang the bell. Jennifer, in all her straitlaced glory, opened the door and stared at her younger sister for what seemed to Jesse like fifteen minutes, but in reality, was probably more like ten seconds. Jesse ended the standoff by getting right down to the more pressing business at hand.
“I assume you got the same call I got,” she said.
“I did,” answered Jennifer.
There was another awkward pause.
“You gonna invite me in, Jen? Or should I just break into your neighbor’s shed, grab a lawn chair, and make myself at home here on your porch?”
Jennifer wrinkled her nose, sniffed, and said, “You smell like vomit and dog poop.”
“Yeah?” Jesse countered, “Well, you smell like judgment and superiority.”
No comment from Jennifer. Here we go again, she thought to herself.
“Okay, that was harsh. I’m sorry,” continued Jesse. “I’m having some stress issues. I think I might have an ulcer. If you’d just let me in, I could clean up a little. Trust me, I’m well aware that I’m not ‘minty fresh’ at the moment.”
Jennifer reluctantly stepped to the side and let Jesse into the McMahon home. It was beautifully decorated in a Town & Country beige sort of way and smelled like French vanilla potpourri.
“So what do you make of it all?” Jesse asked.
Jennifer let her guard down a bit. “I don’t know. I was a little thrown by it, I have to admit.”
“Yeah, me too. I thought maybe we could go to the airport together in the morning?” Jesse suggested.
Jennifer shook her head. “I’m not going. I don’t need the money, and I have no idea who this woman was. For all I know she could’ve made her money in the Blood Diamond trade.”
“Well, how abstractly and self-servingly conscientious of you…” Jesse mumbled.
“Besides,” continued Jen, “I have some really serious personal stuff happening here right now. I can’t go away in the middle of it all. I just can’t. I’m sorry.”
Jesse wasn’t prepared for that response. “You have to go! You heard what he said -- if both of us aren’t there then all of the money is forfeited!”
“I don’t see how they can do that,” Jennifer mused. “If you show up, I’m sure you’ll get your share.”
“Of course they can do that! It’s a legal document. He was very clear about that, Jen. Look, I know you don’t need the money, but I do! I’m not married to Steve Mnuchin like you are. I haven’t had health insurance for four years!”
“Would you please stop calling him Steve Mnuchin? That’s horrifying. Can’t you at least reference a non-Republican with money in your insults?”
Jesse smiled and said, “I could, but where would the fun be in that?”
Yet another awkward pause.
Jesse sighed. “Seriously, you have to go with me, Jen. I just had to quit my job to be able to go to Florida tomorrow, so I have no job now.”
“Again??”
“I really need this money, Jennifer,” Jesse continued. “PLEASE. I’m begging you.” She paused, debating whether or not this was the best moment to broach the subject. “... And I also need a place to stay tonight. When I quit, Kyle kicked me out of his place.”
“Jesus,” Jennifer responded, shaking her head.
“You know what? Forget it,” said Jesse, her self-esteem running on empty. “I’ll sleep in my car. I’m sorry I asked.”
Jesse turned around to head back outside to her new house on wheels. One glance at Jesse’s old beater at the curb and Jennifer’s guilt kicked in.
She sighed and said, “Wait... You can sleep in the guest room. But NO SMOKING in there this time! I had to have the curtains and duvet professionally cleaned after your last stay. I know I’m going to regret this, but … I’ll go talk with Sean about heading to Florida with you tomorrow.”
Jesse, smiling, turned back and gave Jennifer a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you so much. You’re my favorite sister!”
“Shut up,” Jen said, trying not to smile. “And please go brush your teeth,” she added as she headed to Sean’s office. Jesse went to retrieve the entirety of her life from the car.
***
Sean’s office was, of course, beautifully furnished. His Northwestern diploma and doctor’s degrees were framed on the wall next to an antique oak bookshelf filled with hardback medical texts. The shelves on the adjacent wall displayed an array of Civil War memorabilia that Sean had been collecting over the past couple of years, below a tattered, framed Union flag.
Sean himself was also “beautifully furnished,” with a chiseled face framed by a (mostly full) head of wavy brown hair, and a body tanned and muscular from years of tennis and racquetball at their country club. He was the quintessential handsome doctor, the kind that seemed to get better looking with age, a fact that hadn’t escaped Jennifer recently while she examined her elephant-skin elbows that seemed to have appeared virtually overnight.
Sean was sitting at his antique oak desk intently focused on his computer screen through his tortoise-shell reading glasses, so he didn’t register Jennifer when she stepped into the doorway and watched him for a moment. She tip-toed behind him, encircled her arms around his shoulders, and kissed him on the top of his handsome head while trying to peek at the computer screen (allegedly).
He shut his laptop quickly, which wasn’t lost on her, but immediately took one of her hands and kissed it tenderly. “You startled me!”
“What are you working on?” she asked lightly and with a smile.
“Nothing interesting. Just answering work emails, going over billing invoices, that kind of thing. What’s up?”
“My sister just showed up,” said Jen. “Unemployed and homeless.”
He chuckled. “So what else is new?”
“I need to ask you a favor,” she continued.
He swiveled around and lovingly pulled her in close, wrapping his arms around her waist. “Of course. Anything for you.”
“I need to go to Tallahassee with Jesse tomorrow for that meeting with the lawyer.”
“I thought you’d decided not to go,” he said, surprised.
“I had,” continued Jen, “but she knew all the right buttons to push. I need to do it for her. Can you hold down the fort for a couple of days? I’ll move a few things around, fly down there for the meeting tomorrow afternoon, and then fly back first thing Thursday morning.”
“Of course. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine,” he said. “Take as long as you need.”
“Thanks,” she said, trying to cover the sadness those words triggered in her.
***
Jennifer walked back into the foyer just as Jesse came through the front door with her guitar case slung over her shoulder, the puppy tucked under her arm, and all of her bags in her other hand.
“What’re you... NO. You can’t leave a puppy here!” exclaimed Jennifer. “Sean works all day.”
“No, I’m taking him with me,” Jesse responded. “The airline lets you bring a therapy dog on the flight with you. I already called to check.”
“You have to have a legit doctor’s note to be able to do that,” Jen responded.
“Can’t you get Sean to write one for me?” asked Jesse. “He’s a legit doctor.”
“He’s a podiatrist, Jesse.”
“Like they’re ever gonna know that. He can say I have a life-threatening hammertoe condition that makes me super anxious,” she laughed. “Please? Tell Sean if he writes one for me, I’ll name the puppy after him.”
“Oh, yeah, that’ll be huge incentive. Just a dream come true for him.” Exasperated, Jennifer headed back out in the direction of the office. “Sean?...”
As Jesse started off in the direction of the guest room, one of the plastic grocery bags ripped, sending all of her shoes spilling onto the floor. When she set the puppy down to focus on her “sole retrieval,” forcing the scattered shoes into her already overstuffed duffel bag, the puppy peed on the potted palm in the foyer and trotted off.
Jesse stood up trying to balance all of her worldly possessions. Just then, Jennifer’s nineteen-year-old son Connor, captain of the Northwestern Men’s Lacrosse Team, and her eighteen-year-old daughter Maggie, math whiz and this year’s Big 10 Robotics Champion, entered the front door.
“Hey, Aunt Jesse!” said Maggie.
“Hi, guys! What are you freaks doing home?” asked Jesse as she gave them each a hug.
“Laundry,” they responded in unison.
“My God, you’re getting so tall, Connor, I barely recognized you.”
Connor smiled then scrunched his nose as he looked around and sniffed the air. “It smells like piss in here,” he said.
“Shit!” mumbled Jesse. “Sean must’ve peed on the rug. Sean?!...”
She rushed out in search of the errant puppy.
Maggie looked at Connor, confused. “Dad peed on the rug??”
The Key to Circus-Mom Highway was so enjoyable I would have read it from cover to cover in one sitting if I could have managed. The three siblings are delightfully fun, yet each is hiding secret sorrows or traumas that come to light over the course of the story. Their no-holds-barred banter had me laughing out loud as the pages flew past. But even after the story is over, I’m still thinking about these sisters and brother and their families and hoping everything in their lives worked out as if they were real people.
The exciting plot froths forward at speed as Jesse, Jennifer, and Jack follow their mother’s final instructions, literally from the grave, to attain the promised inheritance. Each stop along the way is peopled with interesting and sometimes outrageous supporting characters who reveal a small part of the narrative their birth mother wants to be told. I loved how the estranged sisters and the newly discovered brother come to terms with each other on their journey and truly create a family that includes them all. They blend and support each other as if they’d been together their entire lives, not just for a single week. They pick at each other unmercifully at times, and their exchange of barbs was hilarious.
The siblings’ journey to discover who their mother was swiftly takes them from Chicago to Louisiana to Savannah; they must complete their task within one week or lose out. The plot moves fast, and there’s never a dull moment with these three. Then, just as I got comfortable with where the story was going, a twist or turn occurred, sending any feeling of complacency out the window.
But within the laughter and exciting action, there are also the tragic sorrows and long-held secrets to exorcise. After all, the siblings’ entire lives have been lies. Although wonderful, the parents they knew and loved were never who they thought they were. And just the truth about their birth mother abandoning them, albeit in good hands, would have been huge to wrap one’s mind around.
With engaging main characters in triplicate and a second chance plot, I recommend THE KEY TO CIRCUS-MOM HIGHWAY to contemporary fiction readers who enjoy a modern quest story and witty dialogue.